Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

In terms of the vote just taken and the votes underway, we've seen that the Albanese government cannot even execute a strategy to have one of its own bills defeated. It certainly can't manage to get its bill passed, but it's now not even managing to find a strategy or a means to have its bill defeated either. It certainly can't manage to get its bill passed, but it's now not even managing to find a strategy or a means to have its bill defeated either. The Labor government has so lost control of the way in which its legislative agenda operates that it managed to convince just one non-Labor senator to vote with them. Senator Watt just tried to impugn the votes and the motives of the crossbench. He was a bit selective in which ones he chose to name. But the reality, Senator Watt, is that you only managed to convince one crossbencher to vote with you in that last division because you are failing to convince people of the merits of this policy. And, yes, you're failing in different directions in terms of the approaches, but none are convinced that the Albanese government's policies will make a jot of difference. If, of course, hot air and rhetoric were homes, the housing crisis in Australia would be solved thanks to Minister Watt, Minister Wong and the Albanese government, but hot air doesn't count, rhetoric doesn't count and Labor's plans don't count.

After three Albanese government budgets, not a single extra home has been built. After lots of plans, lots of promises and billions of dollars committed, not a single home has been built. Life is certainly not better. The government comes in and brags about the extent to which they have increased Commonwealth rent assistance. They don't acknowledge the fact that they've had to do so because inflation has been so high under the Labor government and has been higher for longer under this government's plans. After these three Albanese Labor budgets, Australia's inflation rate remains far higher than that of comparable economies around the rest of the world.

This very week, markets around the world are preparing for an expected rate cut in the United States, one of many economies where inflation is lower than in Australia and where interest rates are going down—but not under the Albanese Labor government. Inflation is staying higher, and interest rates are staying higher for longer as a result. That means that homeowners are feeling the pressure. They talk about the plans for a certain number of homes that might be built if everything goes according to plan, but what's happening today, right now, is that tens of thousands of Australian homeowners are falling behind in their mortgage payments and feeling the mortgage stress mounting up because of the failed economic policies of those opposite.

We have been clear all along, from the moment the Labor Party announced this policy, that we thought it was a bad policy. The Commonwealth government shouldn't be in the business of co-owning people's homes. The Liberal and National parties, who stand for homeownership and have it as a core value and a core tenant of our beliefs, believe that Australians should own their own homes themselves and not have the Commonwealth government as co-owners in their homes. That's the core and fundamental difference for us. We want to make sure that housing and infrastructure plans match up with population plans and not have, as this government has seen, record population pressures come in, exacerbating the housing crisis and pressures that are there. We want to make sure that the construction industry is as competitive and efficient as possible and not pile on new layers of industrial relations laws, red tape, green tape, taxes and other things that are driving up the cost of housing. How do you think you are going to fix a housing crisis when it costs more to build a house and when it takes longer to build a house? This is the effect of Labor's policies.

We believe you should get the fundamentals right and not say the solution is some pie-in-the-sky plan for the government to co-own your house with you and to spend billions of dollars on that approach. That is why we fundamentally oppose the games the government is playing. What we see here is that their tactics are failing to convince anybody, even from different perspectives, of the merits of their plans. After three Labor budgets, we're not seeing inflation fixed, we're not seeing interest rates going down and we're certainly not seeing more houses being built.